It is clear that Levinas’s critique of the dominance within Western philosophy of the concept of totality in Totality and Infinity was intended as a response to totalitarian-ism, but the extent to which this determines the organization of the book and the way in which this takes place has been largely misconceived. This is because of the failure to take seriously the opening question of whether or not we are duped by morality. The ethical resistance of the face of the Other does not adequately address that question until morality is secured against the challenge issued by a philosophy that equates being with war and that takes place only through the account of the infinite time of fecundity. Fecundity concretized in the family is the site of resistance to the totalitarian tendencies of any state that seeks for the sake of its preservation to legislate procreation. Hence fecundity and Eros are “beyond the face.” This reading draws on the important role given to fecundity in Time and the Other as well as the texts newly available in the first three volumes of Levinas’s Oeuvres.
The article analyses two cases dealing with the issue of the body, its autonomy and fragility. The first case concerns the decision made by Bettina Goring - whose grandfather was Hermann Goring's brother. The woman decided to undergo tubal ligation so that her family's lineage would die out. The second, better-known case is the story of violence in Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, where American soldiers tortured Iraqi prisoners and captured everything in photographs. Both events explain the importance of the potentiality in the body and its economy and prove that the limits of bodily plasticity - both physical and semantic - are shifted further than commonly believed.
PL
Artykuł jest analizą dwóch epizodów dotyczących kwestii ciała, jego autonomii i kruchości. Pierwszy dotyczy decyzji Bettiny Goring - której dziadek był bratem Hermanna Goringa. Kobieta postanowiła poddać się zabiegowi podwiązania jajowodów, by ród jej rodziny wymarł. Drugi epizod, bardziej znany, to historia przemocy w więzieniu Abu Ghraib w 2003 roku, gdzie amerykańscy wywiadowcy torturowali więźniów irackich i wszystko utrwalili w formie fotografii. Oba zdarzenia wyjaśniają znaczenie potencjalności zawartej w ciele i jego ekonomii oraz udowadniają, że granice cielesnej plastyczności - zarówno fizycznej jak i znaczeniowej - są przesunięte dalej niż powszechnie uważano.
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